Red Hat is out this week with a series of initiatives to further expand and
develop its JBoss middleware platform. On the commercially available product
side there is the JBoss SOA (define) platform and on the community side
there are three separate projects including Black Tie (for BEA Tuxedo
migration), RHQ (a management effort for middleware management) and SOA
Governance.

All told the projects are part of Red Hat's effort to accelerate JBoss to take on 50 percent of the enterprise middleware market.

"As you look at these projects they first start off in the community but
they will become products and part of our product portfolio," Craig Muzilla,
VP Middleware Business at Red Hat explained. "We believe that they will all
help to accelerate our open source middleware since they all relate to the
challenges that IT has."

During a conference call with the media, JBoss CTO Sacha Labourey explained that
the Black Tie effort came out of JBoss's
acquisition of Ajuna in 2005. The goal of Black Tie is simple - to get
users of BEA's Tuxedo transaction server.

Black Tie which is expected to have its first open source release in the
next 60 days will allow for interoperability with Tuxedo as a transaction
server. Labourey claimed it could possibly serve as a replacement to Tuxedo in certain scenarios as well.

On the management side, in a joint open source effort with management vendor
Hypernic, JBoss is developing an open middleware management project called
RHQ.

The goal of RHQ is not necessarily intended to be a standalone effort but
rather to act as a framework on which a complete management product is
based. JBoss Operations Network v2.0 (JON 2.0) from Red Hat will be one such
product. JON 2 is set for a Spring of 2008 release.

In terms of governance, JBoss is kicking off a series of projects all under
the larger banner of SOA governance. Craig Muzilla, VP Middleware
Business at Red Hat, explained that all of the SOA governance projects are
aimed at helping the adoption of JBoss's middleware. While Muzilla could
not provide all the hard details on the SOA governance project he did
indicate that there will be at least three core areas including registry,
repository and policy management.

The registry effort will have a project in it called JBoss DNA which Muzilla
described as a metadata repository that will be based on technology acquired
from Metamatrix. Red Hat acquired Metamatrix for an
undisclosed sum in April of 2007.

In addition to the new open source efforts, JBoss also announced the general
availability of its SOA platform. The JBoss SOA platform is an integrated
set of JBoss technologies that have been combined to form a full SOA
solution. Among the JBoss tools included in JBoss SOA is JBoss ESB (for
service integration), jBPM (for workflow) and JBoss Rules (for policy).

Summing up, Labourey said JBoss' announcements are about innovation of
middleware and SOA.

"It's not innovation for the sake of innovation," he said. "It's about
enterprise acceleration."